Lior Arussy, writing for CustomerThink, shares some characteristics of a courageous CEO. He also says that a courageous CEO has the capacity to drive the organization to be customer centric.

Those leaders who successfully transformed their organizations to become customer centric were courageous in many ways:

• They had the courage to admit that their current value proposition was not good enough to differentiate them from their competition
• They were courageous enough to recognize that the days of product centricity were over and that they needed to start collaborating with their customers
• They were courageous enough and humble enough to listen to their customers
• They had the courage to break down silos and fight against private internal agendas
• They had the courage to align measurements with customer action outcomes
• They had the courage to stand up to the naysayers and say “This is the new direction! You can join us or you can leave us.”
• They had the courage to face change and overcome their fear of the unknown
• They had the courage not to hide behind complacency
• They had the courage to allocate sufficient funding to make customer centricity a real success
• And most of all they had the courage the lead the charge! They were there front and center and lead by example.

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